It's the COVID, stupid!

Of course not entirely. And the virus has plenty of enablers and accelerators. But the horrid result of the Presidential election convinces me that pandemic effects are still working through society. 

Mostly we're too close to the election to be very discerning. I took a broad view yesterday in the comments on David Rothkopf's substack effort to understand what the voters have done:

[David] tossed this remark in as a throwaway: "We still do not fully understand or appreciate what a game changer COVID was for our society." I will not be surprised if future historians with more distance suggest this was the central phenomenon in our politics.

COVID proved to us that government could not protect us -- or that it's response was cruel and useless --or somebody was trying to put something over on us. And many more things, all disillusioning.

I have seen surveys somewhere that internal resilience to the COVID shocks was highest among old people, even though we were objectively the most vulnerable. Very young people were worst thrown off-center. The in-betweens, in-between. [Found the study here. Does seem to say what I remembered.]

In the conditions of 2020-2025 America, our political order just wasn't up to a worldwide plague. Much follows from that, much of it more ultimately damaging than the plague itself ...

Before the vote, Patrick Healy ran focus groups for the New York Times:

The worst of the pandemic may feel far away now, but as we look at the Harris versus Trump contest on Tuesday, Covid is the essential prism through which to understand the trajectory of the last three years in America. The pandemic felled Mr. Trump in 2020, bringing out the true autocrat for all to see on Jan. 6, 2021, and fueled his hunger for the second term he felt he was owed. Covid shaped the economy that Mr. Biden tried to revive through policies that proved inflationary. The shocks and aftershocks of the lockdowns and closures set many of our focus group participants on harder paths in life, from schoolchildren to college students to workers to the elderly.

Covid changed and scarred America. Desperation set in for people who thought of themselves as financially stable or middle class. The frustration we heard in our early focus groups in 2022 metastasized into anxiety in 2023 and intensified into anger in 2024. Listening to them, I stopped seeing anxiety and anger as two distinct emotions. They were one and the same by the time the presidential general election began this year.

So many people talked about their lives before and after Covid that it influenced how I saw Mr. Trump’s chances and Mr. Biden’s challenges in this election (and how those challenges, inevitably, shifted onto Ms. Harris). ...

Nowhere in the world following the pandemic where elections genuinely matter have incumbent parties sustained their power as before. Sometimes the deep societal disruption has had results democratically oriented people can applaud. Voters bounced the Tories in Britain resoundingly and replaced the authoritarian party in Poland more narrowly. Even Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party which runs not entirely free elections saw its margins decreased. 

Meanwhile, far right parties threw the previous bums out in Italy and Argentina, installing the more and less responsible far right.

Our societies have proved far more fragile than they look. We're enduring animals; we'll right ourselves, more or less. 

But the cost will be great. And there'll be novel challenges.